On Mon, Apr 9, 2012 at 2:59 PM, Mark Knecht <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi, > This has long been a sort of hack area of me in terms of sys admin > at home - giving a user account access to the top of a new external > drive. I'd like to learn to do this right. Maybe someone can set me > straight about what root needs to do to make this work. > > OK, so as root I partition & format the USB drive to get it ready, > and then I modify fstab with the following addition: > > c2stable ~ # cat /etc/fstab | grep VideoLib > LABEL=VideoLib /mnt/VideoLib ext3 > auto,rw,users 0 0 > c2stable ~ # > > Having done that, as well as making the /mnt/VideoLib mount point, > my user account can now mount & umount the drive: > > mark@c2stable ~ $ mount /mnt/VideoLib/ > mark@c2stable ~ $ df -h | grep VideoLib > /dev/sdf1 458G 199M 435G 1% /mnt/VideoLib > mark@c2stable ~ $ umount /mnt/VideoLib/ > mark@c2stable ~ $ df -h | grep VideoLib > mark@c2stable ~ $ > > The problem is that at this point my user account cannot create a > new directory on that drive: > > mark@c2stable ~ $ mount /mnt/VideoLib/ > mark@c2stable ~ $ df -h | grep VideoLib > /dev/sdf1 458G 199M 435G 1% /mnt/VideoLib > mark@c2stable ~ $ mkdir /mnt/VideoLib/Video > mkdir: cannot create directory `/mnt/VideoLib/Video': Permission denied > mark@c2stable ~ $ > > In the past I've gotten around this by having root mount the drive > and then change ownership to mark:users once it's mounted. Linux > remembers I've done that once and no longer requires me to do anything > else as root. > > Is that truly required or is there a way to give the user access to > the top of the new mount point without roots' involvement?
Have you tried: # cat /etc/fstab | grep VideoLib LABEL=VideoLib /mnt/VideoLib ext3 auto,rw,users,uid=X,gid=Y 0 0 where X is mark's user id, and Y is users' group id? On the other hand, do you use a desktop environment? Because GNOME does everything you want for you, and I suppose KDE does the same. Regards. -- Canek Peláez Valdés Posgrado en Ciencia e Ingeniería de la Computación Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México
